Why Major or Minor in English: Mission Statement
The English major is designed to convey to students a broad knowledge of English, American, and Anglophone literature, a sophisticated habit of critically engaging literary and cultural texts, a shared understanding of major problems, trends, and methods of literary and cultural analysis, and the ability to pose questions and organize knowledge in productive and original ways. While offering students clear direction on how to profit most from their study within the English department, the major also seeks to encourage students to assume an enduring habit of questioning and intellectual self-articulation.
Goals for Undergraduate English Education
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The Duke English major aims to develop students' abilities to read critically and to write eloquently about significant strands of the vast literature written in English across history and around the globe. An offshoot of this will also be the ability to read any text, whether literary or not, with subtlety and insight.
The Duke English major seeks most fundamentally to develop students' critical acuity in reading which includes understanding the differences between historical periods and how literature created during disparate moments needs to be approached with an awareness of specifically political and social contexts quite different from the present.
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The Duke English major also pursues understanding of literary experience in terms of genres, forms, and structures of meaning. The study of literary texts will include therefore, explicit consideration of formal and theoretical approaches to these texts. The address of theory may also include consideration of the structure and history of language itself (linguistics) as well as such questions as the relationship between literature and other forms of symbolic narration, for example film and television. The aim is not merely to master reading many different kinds of creative writing, but to articulate what literary art and narrative achieves within culture.
Learning Objectives for the Major
The learning objectives for the major are consonant with the general philosophy of Trinity College, with the departmental goals outlined above, and with the more specific guidelines on education in modern languages set forth by the Modern Language Association.
Majors should develop a comprehensive knowledge of the variety of literature written in English in diverse time periods and in diverse locations.
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Majors should develop a reflective and critical awareness of the variety of methodologies used by critics to study literature and related cultural artifacts, and should have an opportunity to consider one or several of these methodologies in depth.
In addition to developing a comprehensive knowledge of the variety of literature written in English in diverse time periods and national locations, majors should also have the opportunity to consider one mode of literature, one period, or one national tradition at greater length.
Majors should develop rhetorically powerful original literature (in the case of creative writing) and/or rhetorically powerful and logically convincing work about literature (in the case of literary criticism).
For further information for the undergraduate program in English, please contact:
Carol Renegar |
Charlotte Sussman |
Dean Norman Keul |
Mailing Address: Undergraduate Studies |